


Twenty Questions

by Fatale (femme)



Category: White Collar
Genre: M/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-05
Updated: 2013-03-05
Packaged: 2017-12-04 09:51:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/709401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femme/pseuds/Fatale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like all the best things in life, it started out as a drinking game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty Questions

Twenty questions  
Peter/Neal  
WC: 2050  
Rating: PG-13 for off-screen violence and language.  
Spoilers: Minor references to season 4, some facts real and some made up.

A/N: Have a fic while you wait for the new White Collar episode! I gotta be honest, this wasn't the fic I was working on, this wasn't even that _other_ fic I was working on. I wrote this on a break from my two others. Wut. Spectacularly un-beta'ed because I just needed to dump this from my brain. Feel free to point out typos.

 

 

 

 

Like all the best things in life, it started out as a drinking game.

“Okay,” Peter said, “I’ll ask twenty questions and you have to answer me honestly.” He dug his badge out of his pocket and slapped it down on the table with resounding thud. “I’m putting this down so you don’t have to think too much about what you can and can’t say, but please don’t take it as license to confess everything you’ve done. Unless you want to.”

Peter wasn’t sure which he preferred. All right, that wasn’t true. Peter always preferred truth, but he had long ago accepted that Neal was an exhausting well of secrets that Peter would never fully understand or know. He mostly didn’t want Neal to confess to something that would tempt Peter to arrest him.

Neal took another sip of his wine, ran a fingertip up and down the stem, carefully considering his answer. “What do I get in return?”

“You get to ask me twenty questions back. We’ll take turns.” Peter polished off the last of his beer. “What are you, scared?” It was a taunt more befitting a ten year old than a forty-nine year old FBI agent, but it always seemed to work on Neal.

Outrage flickered across his face for a second before it settled into benign amusement. “All right. Who goes first?”

“Me,” Peter answered, with a sliver of trepidation. Four beers ago, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have thought this was a good idea. “Why _Mozzie_?”

“Why not Moz?” Neal asked and got up to get Peter another beer. He made a face as he popped it open and set it in front of Peter. “Have you seen how much he’s done for me? Do you even get how much I owe him?”

Peter considered Mozzie for a moment: strange, crazy, and loyal in his own way. “Don’t you get tired of all your friends being criminals?”

“Is that your second question?” Neal topped off his glass with the dregs of the wine from the bottle.

“Sure.”

“Okay. I mean, did you miss the newsletter or something? Peter, I’m a criminal. You get the friends that you deserve.” He shrugged. “Occasionally, you even get better.”

Peter wanted to argue the point - that Neal deserved better than Kate, much better than Alex and maybe even better than Mozzie, but Neal wouldn’t take kindly to Peter insinuating that the people he held near were anything less than deserving of his certain brand of insane loyalty and protection.

“Yeah, okay, sure,” Peter agreed, even though he _totally didn’t_. This was, he’d had too much to drink and this wasn’t nearly as much fun as he thought it would be.

“My turn,” Neal said.

 

***

 

They got ten questions in before Peter finished his beer and had to take a cab home.

 

***

 

Peter heard the sounds long before he saw Neal fall, like the whole scene was playing in slow motion. Peter’s car accident felt a lot like this: the realization, the panic, the inevitability, and then saying a small prayer as he braced for impact.

He held pressure to Neal’s chest, the red beneath his fingers sluggishly pumping in tune to Neal’s heartbeat. “Hold on,” he told Neal. He meant it to be calming, but the desperate tone underlying his words made them come out high and sharp and shaped all wrong.

“M-my turn,” Neal said unsteadily, eyes hazy and unfocused.

“What?” he asked, disbelieving.

“My question. Do you regret it? Getting me out of prison?”

Peter had to lean down to hear him, had to listen carefully over the bubbling wheezes coming from Neal’s chest and where the hell was the ambulance? He felt his breath hitch, the warmth of Neal’s sticky blood in-between his fingers and the yawning distance of endless years ahead of him without Neal. “Not for a second,” he breathed into Neal’s ear and watched Neal’s eyelashes flutter once, twice, then close.

 

***

 

He’d thought Neal had forgotten the game, which could be understood given that Neal got _shot_ and all. Throughout the hospital, his slow recovery, he hadn’t said anything until one day when Neal randomly blurted out, “When did you lose your virginity?”

So this was still going on.

Peter put down his pen. “Um, 18. Senior prom. Buick.”

“Oh, Peter,” Neal said softly, looking appalled.

“What, like your first time was something out of a movie? I bet it was, bet it was like a scene from the Graduate. You can tell me, who was your Mrs. Robinson?”

“Is this your question?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Neal looked thoughtful. “I don’t remember. I was 16, at a party and got really drunk. People told me afterwards that I went into a bedroom with some girl, but I got into trouble, transferred schools, my friends changed all the time and I just don’t remember her name anymore.”

“Well, that’s kind of horrible,” Peter said after a small pause.

Neal flashed him a quick grin. “Yeah, I was never any good at being a boyfriend, even then.” He scooped up his hat from the edge of Peter’s desk and put it on before leaving, before Peter could explain that Neal wasn’t the part that bothered him about the story. Peter’s first time had been awkward and his fingers had got tangled in her bra, her dress, but she’d been warm and giggled in his ear while Peter laughed back and afterwards, he’d bundled her up in his coat and kissed her hair softly. The first time you had sex shouldn’t be with strangers, with a girl you didn’t know and possibly didn’t like, and couldn’t even remember afterwards.

He’d come face to face with irrefutable proof that Neal was just a little fucked in the head plenty of times, but he always felt strangely surprised each time it happened, like somehow Neal was able to whitewash each experience and start with a clean slate.

Peter felt a sudden flash of guilt at that - he’d purposefully let Neal distract him, thinking it would hurt Neal too much to be known, to be taken apart like a book without a binding, page by page. But Peter had done him a disservice by not pushing harder, by not paying attention to what he needed versus what Neal said he needed, because Neal didn’t lie to anyone as much as he did himself.

 

***

 

“Do you trust me?” Neal asked, eying the shipping container. They had Jones hostage and at least three of them were armed. They knew they were surrounded, and that made them stupid and desperate. Neal had a sketchy alias, a tracking watch and a give ‘em hell attitude. This was a bad idea in more ways than Peter could count.

He fought against the rising tide of panic; he remembered the last time this happened and how much it almost cost him. His hands felt slick and numb.

“Is that your question?” Peter could tell by the slight way Neal’s eyes widened that he’d caught him by surprise.

“Is this really the time or place?”

“Yes, no. Possibly. I’ll answer it later. Okay, go. Be careful. I’m right behind you.”

Peter never did get to answer, and it was just as well because he wasn’t really sure what he’d have said. Did he trust Neal? With his own life, sure. Probably with any of his agents, definitely El or Mozzie or June’s. But with Neal’s life? No. Neal wasn’t cautious enough, took too many risks.

Neal would always say that no life was as important to him as his own, but Peter couldn’t believe that, not after he’d seen Neal run headfirst into dangerous situations unarmed and unprepared.

Peter needed to get home to see El. This game had begun to _suck_.

 

***

 

“Question,” Neal said loudly from the doorway, where he hovered, fiddling with his hat anxiously.

Just the fact that he hadn’t barged in and made himself at home was enough to give Peter pause. Peter motioned for him to take a seat and waited for Neal to settle down.

“Are we still doing this?”

Neal gave him an exasperated look that said, _clearly_ and may have added, _stupid_.

Peter waited for Neal to stop fidgeting and surveying his desk, carefully looking anywhere but directly at him.

Finally, Neal asked, “What’s it like to be in love?”

Peter opened his mouth to ask about Kate, then shut it, because Kate was a can of worms he didn’t want to open right now and the fact that Neal didn’t equate her with ‘being in love’ anymore was both deeply tragic and probably very healthy. “It’s…” Peter closed his eyes, willing the words to come to him. “It’s like having a safety net at all times, but being too high in the sky for it to matter.”

“That is terrible metaphor,” Neal said.

Peter tried again, “It’s just, so hard to describe. I don’t know. You wrap up all your love and hopes and fear into one person. The idea of losing them is terrifying, would destroy you, but you can’t avoid it, and you wouldn’t want to. Because the person you love who returns that love has always got your back, they’ll always come for you, support you, be there for you.” He shrugged helplessly. He knew this was important to Neal, but Neal was a puzzle with half of the pieces missing and he didn’t know how to put them together in any way that made sense.

But Neal was nodding slightly, like he got what Peter was trying to say anyway. Peter felt infinitely relieved, since even he didn’t know where he was going with this.

“Now my turn,” Peter said. “Why do you want to know?”

Neal tensed up, every muscle in his body visibly rigid. “Ask another question.”

Peter knew his eyebrows probably looked like they were trying to crawl off of his forehead. “What?”

“Not now, Peter. Just ask me another question.”

Truthfully, Peter had expected this at some point, which was at least in some part of the reason he started this game, because Neal would never reveal any part of himself that Peter hadn’t paid for in some way - with favors, with honesty, with trust. This was a give and take, and Peter couldn’t take anything from Neal without Neal taking just as much back.

“How about an easy one? Chinese or Thai for dinner? Get your coat, you can stay over tonight.”

 

***

 

When Neal kissed him, the only thing surprising was just how unsurprised he was.

“Yes,” Neal said, “Chinese sounds good,” and leaned over and kissed him.

Peter had seen this coming at the edge of his periphery, watched it warily for years. He’d thought about it, examined it from every angle and taken it apart and fit it back together to see how it might work and it never quite did.

The one thing he hadn’t anticipated was how right it would feel, the slide of Neal’s lips against his, the soft flutter of his eyelashes and the rough scrape of his teeth against Peter’s bottom lip.

“Last question,” Neal said, voice low and breathless. He head was tilted slightly down, so Peter couldn’t meet his eyes, but Peter could still feel his soft huff of breath against his neck, could smell the faint scent of wine and charcoal that always hovered around Neal. “Do you love me?”

This twenty questions game was terrible, Peter thought, then he noticed Neal’s neck, the tiny pulse that jumped at the hollow of his throat, tangible and frail and way too fast.

“Dammit, Neal,” Peter sighed, all at once feeling frustrated, tense and vaguely frightened. “You know I do.”

Neal kissed him again, fisting his shirt, pulling him into it until they were both breathless, and more than a little turned on.

“Let’s go home,” Peter said, and hoped his words carried all they weight they were meant to.

“Okay,” Neal replied softly.

Neal looked up at him then, uncertainty and hope and desire flashed across his face, shutter quick and nearly too fast to catch. Unless you were Peter, who always caught Neal, and who was beginning to think that this game was _awesome_.

 

 

 

The end.


End file.
